Chapter 58: The Morning After
ight. You’d think the morning after you climb out of a 10-point hole you’d wake up dancing. I woke at 5, the way I wake at 5 every day now, with the list already running. The rec wanting its grass cut.
Mooney’s hamstring to mind, Aiden’s foot to nurse, Doyle’s badges to chase, a teamsheet for Saturday, a cup tie to prep, and under the whole pile the next £16,667 due on the last day of September, payment 3 of 24, sat there like a tooth you cannot leave alone.
We took the cork out of the bottle on Saturday and the whole town heard it go. By Monday the bottle was empty, the list was as long as it ever was, and we were still 24th of 24, off the minus and dead last, the novelty of being alive worn clean off and only the work left under it.
Maureen took the ledger out of my two hands at half seven. Riffle of the notes.
"Go home."
"I’ve got the..."
"You’ve nothing today Stan can’t run, Doyle can’t take, and I can’t sign." Tap of the pen. "You’ve not had a day since June. You’re grey. Go up town, be a person, come back Tuesday with a face the lads can stand to look at. No man does every job in a place forever, Sam. Especially not you."
And the truth of it was that she was right, and not only about the day off. Stan had taken the Tuesday nights on the rec without being asked and run them tighter than I do. Doyle had the Thursday session now, clipboard and whistle, the lads calling him coach before anybody had decided he was one.
Three months I had been every job in this club, every night of the week, and somewhere in the last fortnight, without my once noticing it happen, the place had quietly learned to get through a Tuesday without me.
I should have felt the weight lift off. Mostly I felt the cold little draught a man feels when he learns he is not, after all, the one beam holding the whole roof up. I had no name for that feeling yet. I would have one by Christmas.
So I went to London. I told Maureen it was to clear my head. I told myself it was to chase money, because there is always money to chase when you owe £400,000 in slices of £16,667, and a skint man’s head will gladly think about money the whole way across a city sooner than think about the thing it actually wants to think about.
There was real business in it. A man runs Sunday pitches off the Goldhawk Road and owes an old contact of mine a favour, and a favour like that is a pre-season friendly that fills a coach and a kiosk, which is the kind of money a club like mine actually lives on. I went to see him.
That part I will swear to. Clatter of the train over the points, the better part of two hours of it, and I spent the first of them being very busy and very honest about coach fares and gate splits on the back of a Sportskit receipt.
The Boots was on the way. I want that on the record, because I have turned it over since and it is the one true thing I can hold. I did not cross London to stand at a window. The window was simply there, between the station and the Goldhawk Road, the way the heaviest things in a man’s life are always just there on the route, minding their own business, waiting for him to walk past.
Not now, Karen.
I have been saying it to myself for two lifetimes, the way you lift a cat you love down off a kitchen counter, no temper in it, only the same patient hand a hundred times over. I had said it through a World Cup and a court case and a whole season of Saturdays. I said it coming up the pavement. Then I was at the glass, and it stopped working.
She was behind the counter in a green smock, doing a woman’s eyeliner with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and I am not going to be noble about how she looked, because you have waited longer for this than I have. Karen is a knockout.
It is not a word I use and I have hunted two lifetimes for a better one. She is the sort who stops a Tesco car park dead just by crossing it, a figure with no honest business existing outside an oil painting, put together by a committee who knew they had the one go at it.
My dad’s line, borrowed seeing as he is not here to use it himself: a backside on her you could stand a fresh pint on and never lose a drop. And she was drawing a careful line on a stranger’s eyelid in a chain chemist on a wet Tuesday, 20 years old, knowing none of it.
I went in. Chime of the door.
I have told myself a dozen reasons since and not one of them is true. I lifted a meal deal I did not want out of the chiller, hum of it against my fingers, and I queued at her till the same as the people in front of me queued, and when it came to me she looked up with the smile they train into you, the one that is for everybody and is therefore for no one.
"You alright there?"
Two lifetimes. A World Cup. A wedding that has not happened yet and a green dress and a kitchen table and a boot full of boxes carried out to her car. And the first words she will ever say to me, in this life, are you alright there, the very same she said to the man before me and will say to the man behind.
"Grand," I said. "Ta."
Beep of the scanner. "That’s 3.20."
I counted the coins out. Our hands did not touch and I was glad of it and sorry for it inside the same half second. She tipped my change into a little paper bag, rustle, and she was already looking past my shoulder to the woman with the wire basket, because to her I was a meal deal and a smile and 3.20 and not one thing more, which is exactly what I ought to be, and being it took the wind clean out of me.
"Cheers," she said. To me. To the queue. To the air.
I could have told her.
That is the mad part, the part I chewed on the whole way home.
I could have stood at that till and said her name and the name of the church and the song that will be playing the night she finally decides she has waited long enough on a skint dreamer, and she would have reached very calmly for the button they keep under the counter for men who do that sort of thing. So I said cheers back, and I picked up a sandwich I was never going to eat, and I walked out into the brap and hiss of the street.
I did not look back through the window. I had looked enough to last me, and the looking had cost more than I had budgeted, and I am a man on a budget now in every way there is. There will be a time. When the club is standing on its own legs and my hands are not empty and the years have run on and caught me level with her again. Not this Tuesday. This Tuesday I was a meal deal.
But I knew the corner now.
I got the train back to the marsh, chunter over the points, a sandwich I never opened on the table and the name of a street folded away somewhere safer than anything else I own.
[SYSTEM] No file. No number. Nothing on her you were not already carrying. You stood at the till of the one thing I cannot price, and you paid 3.20 and left. Daft. Correct, but daft.
Correct, but daft. I got off at my stop, and I went back to work.
